Travel in Age of Conan is never dull.

hordes, and ancient middle eastern mysticism. Age of Conan is subscription based, but it is well worth it, featuring cutting edge DirectX 10 graphics.

Age of Conan’s gameworld is lush and vibrant, owing this to the use of the Cheetah engine, with advanced shadowing and lighting, SpeedTree which provides a rich high quality of foliage rarely seen in MMORPG games, and Umbra which allows the world to be drawn to large distances, which really immerses you in the gameplay. The game contains three main countries namely: Cimmeria, an arctic land filled with mountains, snow and ice, Aquilonia which is comprised of rolling green hills, open plains and temperate forests as well as the large bustling city Tarantia, and Stygia which is for the most part, vast deserts and dunes, and thriving cities. There’s also the island of Tortage which is mainly tropical. The music and voice acting in Age of Conan ispraiseworthy, with more than 40 voice actors contributing to the game, you never feel as if your speaking to the same NPC over and over again (unlike The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion).

Character customization in Age of Conan is incredibly detailed and open to creativity, your able to choose your facial features, tattoos and a plethora of other details. You first pick your homeland, and

Hyborian is one of the most immersive gameworlds around.

after that your able to choose one of 12 classes (which come under the main four: Rouge, Priest, Soldier and Mage) although not every class is available to each race, with only the Khitan able to choose from each main class, however you’ll find a class that suits your playing style regardless of your choice of homeland.

Unlike many of its counterparts, Age of Conan features minimal grind. Age of Conan is centered around combat, and consequently the combat in Age of Conan is the very best that an MMO game has to offer. Combat in Age of Conan (both PvP and PvE) is based on directional attacks, you can attack from the top or bottom diagonally in either direction, or go for an overhead attack to your enemies skull. The combat is also based on combinations of attacks, difficult combinations cause far greater damage at a much faster rate. The

Combat is Age of Conan's strongest feature.

combat is immersive, brutal and mature, and is one of Age of Conan’s highest achievements. The quests are extremely well written and always interesting, despite being based on regular objectives (gather this, kill this, rescue this), and this can be attributed to the well written story, and real effort put into the plot by the writers.

Overall, Age of Conan is a well polished, immersive and one of the most satisfying MMORPG’s to be played, the combat shines as an example to other MMO games, and will keep you coming back for more, a rare trait among games of this genre.

Training in Mabinogi

Mabinogi has undergone a number of updates (called “generations” by the developers), with each new update comes new worlds to explore, as well as extending the plot and giving the player new quests to undertake, currently Mabinogi is up to Generation 12, and further updates will be released in coming years.

One of the many features that sets Mabinogi apart from other MMORPG’s is its class system, that is to say, there isn’t one. In Mabinogi your given a choice of race,  human, elf or giant. You can choose the age of your character (between 10 and 17, but don’t fret your character ages a year every week), and ability points are given with aging, with the amount decreasing with age. You have a huge amount of control of your characters appearance, and if you pay for a premium appearance you can customize your can then customize lips eyes and other features in much more detail, but its not essential to gameplay. You can at any point in the game chose to be reborn, giving your character a new appearance while maintaining all skills that you gained, this is an excellent choice on the part of the developers, and really extends the

Mabinogi 's anime art style works well.

life of Mabinogi’s gameplay. What you feed your character also determines what it’s build is like. You can also acquire the ability to transform into a paladin or dark knight.

The graphics in Mabinogi is based on a mixture of medieval Europe and Anime styling’s, which works surprisingly well together. Mabinogi is filled with towns, open countryside, jungles, volcanos, castles, the deserted city of the gods, dungeons and quest areas, and is expanded constantly with major updates.  There are many subtle intricacies within Mabinogi, for example there are two moons in the sky, and one of them were told is the source of all magic energy, mana regenerates at a much faster rate when this moon is in the sky.

Another cool feature is the quest system in Mabinogi. Rather than seek out an NPC or location, quests and items are dropped by owl’s at random intervals, often enough so that you have plenty to do, but not so frequently as to overwhelm you. The PvP combat in Mabinogi is excellent, if you choose manual combat reaction times and predicting your enemy are the order of the day, but if

PvP combat in Mabinogi

your not that fast, you can choose the automatic combat mode, however automatic combat against a manual player isn’t recommended, as your characters moves become very predictable. Mabinogi also includes a number of part time jobs to help you gain ability points, but these in all seriousness are a chore to be endured. Another noteworthy feature is the social interaction system, specifically the ability to play your own music on instruments in the game, sit around a campfire, play mini-games and share food.

When it comes down to it, Mabinogi is fun, and more importantly free, making it excellent value for money, although the point and click movement system can get a bit tired, the atmosphere and pacing of the game more than make up for it.

Aion PvP

still has light became known as the Elyos, and those that lived in darkness came to be known as the Asmodian.  You start as a human in your world of choice, and through the completion of tasks, you ascend as winged immortal Daeves (sort of like demigods), and become holy servants to their respective peoples.

The world of Aion, thanks largely to the CryEngine can be stunningly pretty at times. Aion is quite possibly the prettiest MMORPG game ever made, having said that, Aion like many other games in the genre, still pales in comparison to most modern FPS games.

Character customization is one of Aion’s strongest features. You choose from two races (although the choice makes only cosmetic changes to your character and the gameplay), and you then choose from four classes: Warrior, Scout, Priest and Mage with further class specialization coming at level nine. The facial customization in Aion is excellent, allowing you to select hair style, skine tone, facial textures and facial features, so far as to say that it puts your characters in the uncanny valley (so real that the brain can’t

Flying in Aion as an Asmodian

possibly register them as real), which can be a tad unsettling. Aion allows you to fully customize the size, scale of body parts and the weight of your character; it can be a looming giant, or a diminutive midget. However an issue of contention with Aion is the character animation when you change size, larger characters appear to move in slow motion, and smaller characters move much faster than normal.

Flight is one of Aion’s major draw cards. Unfortunately its somewhat ruined by the inability to fly for more than a minute at a time before an atmosphere shattering alarm sounds and your forced to land and regain your strength. Quests rarely call on you to fly, and you’ll often run into invisible walls and be forced to land, with no justification given in game other than inferred uncreative design by the developers.

Quests in Aion are not varied, and after about twenty hours really start to have a grinding quality to them, and they become a chore, with only the choice of fetch, kill, collect and deliver objectives. Unfortunately there’s not a large volume of quests available, and you’ll find yourself repeating the same quests over and over again in order to level. Combat in Aion is fluid and well designed, and focuses on attack combinations, in a system very similar to that of Assassins Creed. The large PvPvE battles, which involve

Aion is avery pretty game, just not often enough.

players controlling huge fortresses can be a lot of fun when they’re balanced, however when there are a large number of players involved, the servers struggle to keep up and the game comes very close to being unplayable.

Overall, Aion is a missed opportunity. The quests become mind numbingly dull after the first 20 or so game hours, and you’ll find that to level you’ll simply be going through the motions without actually engaging with the game. A major issue for me at least, was the consistently horrible ping times on oceanic servers (always over eight hundred). If the game world were as well planned and full of life as the starting areas, Aion would be a winner, but in its current state, it’d be difficult to justify paying for Aion.

Lycan from Immortal Night

Immortal Night is a fantasy game that has you develop a character in the world of Immortal Night. A world filled with supernatural creatures and beings. You play as a human turned into either a Vampire or a Lycan (werewolf), however you have 5 days to change your mind and switch classes. You move through the game world feasting on blood, prowling the night, and battling rival Houses for territory and dominance. Your ultimate aim is to become the most powerful immortal in the world of Immortal Night.

Immortal night is a browser based text interface game. There are a huge amount of quests to complete, ranging from home invasions, and theft of precious scrolls, fighting other vampires, or hunting Lycans. The world is an alternate reality of our world, the cities and towns are modeled on their real world counterparts, such as London or New York.

Stats

You level up by visiting the training ground, where you can work on your Strength, Speed, Accuracy, Labor and Defense. You gain IQ (Which is important when completing mischievous deeds) by trading gold for IQ points at the exchange. In order to be able to attempt certain quests you must take courses at the school, and these courses also boost your stats. The main source of experience points is attacking other players, the success of your attacks being dependant highly on your stats and the quality of your weapons, but to some extent success also depends on chance.

Vampire from Immortal Night

Immortal Night has a multitude of weapons and amour to chose from, and like many games, the quality of weapons and armor available increases as you level up.  A large part of the game is also based on prowling, where you venture out into the game world and the game will give you random events to navigate through, this can also be a source of frustration, as Immortal Night often choses to injure your character or have you captured during prowling, not to discourage prowling though, as the rewards can be great.

Overall, Immortal Night can be enthralling once you overcome the initial feeling of being overwhelmed, there is literally so much to do, prowling and combat will provide endless entertainment, and the sheer size of the game world in Immortal Night will keep you occupied for some time.

The brilliance of Napoleonic War is the same timer based building and upgrading that was used in Evony Free Forever.  This timer based system is the real-time strategy aspect of the game, and means the player needs to think about what to build next so they have enough resources to build something afterwards, or so they can build a pre-requisite of another building or troop type.  This timer based RTS system means the NapWar player doesn’t need to be there the whole time.  This lends itself to players of other MMORPG games like World of Warcraft or even Evony itself.  As you can switch windows to NapWar and check on your upgrades and if neccessary you can kick off another building or upgrade after the timer has finished.  This is particually useful when playing a game like WoW as when you jump on a ship or griffen to fly to somewhere else, or if there is 2 minutes of down time while waiting for other members of your alliance to gather, you can do a quick window switch, play some NapWar and switch back to WoW.

Also the alliances inside NapWar can take up to 100 people, so if you have an alliance in WoW you can extend your friendship into NapWar and have the same people in an alliance in Napwar.  This will make your alliance stronger as you can talk about either game inside the other game.

The ranking system of NapWar is Prestige.  Prestige is a measure of how big your city is, how many troops you have and how much technology you have.  Building up any of these will make your prestige go up.  Attacking other players takes prestige off them.
Playing NapWar is relatively simple as you can go through beginner quests which teach you how to play.  Once you’re out of the 7 day beginner protection the strategy part comes in.  You need to make sure when you attack someone that you leave enough troops at home so that if someone attacks you then you can defend your city from them.  More Tactics come in as you can now deploy your troops into a rudamentary strategy of defend or move forward.  There is also a graphical representation of the fights and you can even go in and control the fights real time.  This is a new fighting engine and is time and turn based, which works suprisingly well, even on web browser technology.

Fog of War: Napoleonic War is a fun game to play, and with the timer based Strategy system the game player can chose how much time to spend on it.  It could take over your life, or it could be a nice side game while playing another MMORPG.

In Travia you are leader or the chieftain of a village in roman times. You have different choices on who you want to play as. For example Romans, Gauls or Teutons. You have the control over your Travia village and the lands around the village as you are the leader. The lands of Travia have resources which you have to gather like wood, clay, iron crops etc. You are expected to gather to expand your economy and village by building new buildings for different purposes which is one of the main features that Travia has taken from the RTS game Age of Empires. There is a building tree which has buildings for growth and economy like granaries and also buildings for military like barracks and archeries. Troops can be trained at the barracks and with them you can raid other villages or defend yourself from other players on the same travia server.

Now the game concept is clear, we can call Travian a MMORTS – Massively Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy Browser Game. Travia can be very frustrating for those players who not patient since the real time strategy is quite “real” time taking as it is very very slow in performing actions. Increasing resources production would not only take “real time minutes” but also will take resources. In gathering more resources giving Travia a touch of the real world. The downfall of this Online Game is you can only do one type of action at a time like gathering or attacking, but thankfully you can chat and send messages to your friends or enemies during your action time. The map will not only show the map of the area your in but also will tell how much time will it take for you to complete a certain action that your doing.

As you play the game more often you will find that the game mostly does all the work it self, it just awaits your instruction on what to do, which can be somewhat boring to those who are hungry for action. The game basically focused at those games who have used the “Email system” to play mulitplayer the difference being that it is browser based making it automatic yet still a bit boring. But it can be a great game for those who have little time to spend on games, as they can give instructions and comeback later to see what happened and what to command next.

The goal of the game is simple. It is to become powerful and dominate the server you are in. Now its your way to choose, either form Travian Alliances and become one nation under one banner or by conquering your opponents. New players who play Travian with determination can and will dominate the game, but its not a game for an causal person who just wants a taste of it for a few days. The good feature of the game is you can’t lose or win over another. For example if you are being conquered by another, the other player won’t be able to gain control of your last village which would give the chance to keep playing Travian again and expand.

Currently the game has more then a million players registered and playing since the game is Free To Play. This means you will always have someone as your enemy and someone as your friend. The game is built on simple non-animated 2D graphics which are beautiful made anda are guaranteed to make you an addict of the game. Travia however is now losing players to the brand new Free Browser Game of Evony. Evony is very similar to Travia, however it is updated in gameplay and graphics.